


like the hills in the highlands

by constantine



Category: SUTCLIFF Rosemary - Works, The Mark of the Horse Lord - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Gen, Parenthood, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, haven't done this in a while
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:35:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5729716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constantine/pseuds/constantine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They dance every day of the summer, and through the harvest turning. They do without a piper for most of them, and often only seven or five or just two women can come to the courtyard and stand for dances are meant for a dozen, for every woman of a household together.<br/>But there is someone standing there in the court of the Women’s Place each morning, so every day Murna comes out to them and stops on the edge of the beaten ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like the hills in the highlands

  They dance every day of the summer, and through the harvest turning. They do without a piper for most of them, while the old woman who plays best is busy at bedsides, and often only seven or five or just two women can come to the courtyard and stand for dances are meant for a dozen, for every woman of a household together.

  This household is mostly made of spaces now. Some, fewer than there might be, are kept to their cots by wounds or the fever: most who would have been never came so far towards home. Laying plans and their own preparations for the war trail without their king’s noticing had only kept them a few days behind the men, and that distance was made up soon enough, so that for every man who has died on the fields, there is a woman missing from their number also.

  But there is someone standing there in the court of the Women’s Place each morning, so every day Murna comes out to them and stops on the edge of the beaten ground.  
“I could be sleeping,” she tells the first of her friends among the dancers almost every time, although if she can, she has not been. “I need the rest.”

  “You need to move,” the young woman says back. “You aren’t fat enough yet that you can’t, and it will be better on your back and your stomach when you are if you do now. And a babe should have a chance to learn the dances even now.”

  If she did not say it so roughly, Murna might manage to go, back to her rooms and the years of treasured wordlessness that have built up in their corners. But she does, and the others stand about with shoulders back and studiedly impatient feet making clear that they will be dancing if she stays or no, when the first purpose of all this is to make her come outside, and she cannot let them do any such thing without her.

  Murna never loses her thoughts in those dances, and she does not think, following them in the corners of her eyes and then by the whirl of red light and dark when she closes them, that the other women do, either. No one is taken by the joy-fever of the dances—perhaps, partly, because they have no piper, but it is well enough. The circles wheel under them, the tracks of harvest dance and planting, weavers’, wool walking, and lovers’ dances and war, regardless of their season or what they are usually meant to mean, and she could find each dancer blind not only by the long-familiar movements but by the changes they have had to make room for, the new outlines and the scent no one can shake. Many who stayed after her have cropped their hair now, not in grieving, but because the ends lit along with the burning glen, and they still smell of it around the edges, while those who were keeping the cattle and the wounded carry their labor with them. There is no swish of swinging plaits, and skirts pull and rustle over bodies unaccustomed to being whatever they are now. No one’s grace is the same as it had been, stiff backs, bruises, the curve of a handless arm. So no one is thinking more of war in the war dances than the harvest and the weaving, or less of love.

  It is only that her body does not need her either to think or not to while she dances. Her head will go where it may, and she does not mind so much whether she thinks or no, and if it is of good things or not, when she is not obliged to be thinking anything in particular.

  When the last week comes and the soles of her feet are too sore for much moving, even if the rest of her would be grateful for it after, she takes a place at the side with the round-faced girl who has been beating out their time in her hands and adds her own, so they can play a little more of a pattern between them. It feels like no surprise when the baby comes after few enough of those days, like she knew when it would be in a way she had not been sure before that she would. However many old women may say that we have been doing this since the world began, before they are old and can claim to have had ancestral knowledge young women have to live everything for the first time by themselves, not knowing so surely what they are doing, and Murna is a young woman still, with lifetime ahead of what she has not done.

 

 

  The boy does not have red hair—he is born with a little, dark, and later it will be all the grey-brown out of her own, as Conory’s would be if he let it alone, since the two of them have always looked close enough that the babe might almost as easily be his and not hers. Sometimes the color bides a generation.  
  She had known that, and not expected he would, her firstborn boy. But when she lifts him, she realizes she had thought to have a daughter also, with that red hair.

 

 

  She is not sure at first if she wants to love her boy, if that means she will begin to want things from him, and take, and overcrowd the natural forking course of a seedling-spirit’s growth. But one day in the first year he is pulling away from her lap, hoping to go somewhere or do something a child so young almost certainly should not, and slaps a baby hand down her side, very light.

  She laughs, has to, and the sound, and maybe the feel of her belly moving around him, makes him still, blinking his round eyes as if they beat the pace of oncoming baby-thoughts. Then he does the whole thing again, and again and again from then on, and she finds that she likes him. Love, once you like someone for how they are, is nothing like the same.  
She still tries not to want things of him, and thinks that she can do that. She wants for him to think, and to care enough to find ways to be kind.

  “And how shall you see to that, then, my Lady?” Conory asks, when he is just turned two, and then later, “Oh. Here—I think I might see one way for you.”

  His cat has not grown lovelier with the years. The fur she has left to her name will be fading soon, the rest of her knotted and dimpled with scars that tug one ear down, one corner of her mouth up, her sparse crest askew from her spine. Most days she spends as a hearthrug, or a spare pillow among the fleeces in the hall, which is where Murna finds him later, murmuring at her. He is wrapping her paws in strips of kidskin, the way some wrap the hooves of horses or cattle to be quieter in the raiding, and she turns lamp-eyes rich with resentment from him to Murna over his shoulder.

  “My Lord,” Murna says, on the cat’s behalf and her own. But she allows him to haul the cat up and carry her to where her boy is playing at the hearth, turning over a fallen cooking-spoon just too long for him to lift.

  The cat, deposited, threatens to arch her back, but then settles down sitting again an arm’s length from the boy, who has just found he can take the spoon by the middle more easily that the end and then is tapping it joyously against his own feet and the floor, and so takes some minutes to notice the cat by him. He has either never noted her before, or had not realized she was a living animal.

       Tap, tap, tap.

   He has the spoon to think of, or the cat, turning back and forth between the subjects of his interest, and now comes alight with the idea of bringing them together. He taps the floor near Shan as he slides himself towards her, then the tip of her tail. She puffs, and he is enchanted. 

  The spoon goes across her tight shoulders, and she smacks him in the face. Conory sweeps up the cat, once they are done, and Murna takes the boy. The wrappings stay on, which the cat likes as much as cats ever do. Murna is certain if she chose she could have her claws again in an instant, as she has torn through hide armor before. But she doesn’t choose to, and in a month’s time Conory looks to Murna and unties them. She would have been willing earlier, but he knows what the creature can do better, and less than she has learned now of young children.  
The boy does not hit the cat, bar by accident, and she refrains from clawing him, at least until he is older and can afford the blood.

  In his fourth winter, counting the one he was born to, he is crying over some hurt and Conory strokes and sweet-talks the cat until she rumbles, and then drops her on his small lap. Murna slips her boy something for the cat to eat, and has to waft her hands at him until he offers it to her. The cat has grace enough to act as if she wouldn’t have taken it from him herself if he had been any slower, and licks it up before she pools across his legs, purring rather pointedly, as cats do for pain.  
He looks down at the great hairy blanket of her, up to Murna and down again, staying still as a good cat-bed ought to except to touch the top of her head carefully every now and then, the bruise soothed or forgotten.

  Murna tries not to sigh.

  “Well, it serves as an example,” Conory says, with the sound of a smile, because he is not charged with keeping a child and can still laugh at them openly. “But I suppose you just keep being there to be seen, and every now and then you ask the little kitten to try a challenge on his own.”

“You may not give him a kitten from that creature,” Murna says. He may have one, since certainly a wildcat is a good thing to learn to be like, but she will decide when and how vicious an animal is acceptable. She is not about to speak to any comment that comes after that sort of ‘I suppose’, but she doesn’t mind his saying it. It is good sometimes to stand with someone and listen to them say the things you think.

  Well, she is used to being a Queen’s example to her people: it takes the better part of her to do it every day, but work that is worth doing often does. If she has done it anyway for this long, then she supposes she will manage to be a queen to her babe, too.

“He is tall enough to sit a pony on his own, soon,” she says as she thinks, and Conory smiles in the corner of her eye, “and not only ride in front of me. A king should know the horse-breaking, and not just know, but love the work, care enough to. So I suppose that will be a way, too.”

 

 

  She left him under charge of a girl some years older who usually carries him about and guards his afternoon naps, and her under the watch of the piper and the other old women, when she rode the first time down through the glens to the Roman fort and town. A time after that she goes and comes back with two Roman girls for nursemaids, because it may sound like the cooing of a mess of self-satisfied pigeons to her, but he will need to learn Latin even so.

  So he does, as the brown-grey hair comes in more than baby-fine at last, and the girls comb it and then teach him to. That ends with him looking more than a little like the wolfhounds with their grey bristle manes on top, a look which soon seems to be there to stay. He is not going to be a beauty like his father or his grandmother were, though maybe he will be one like Conory, who no one can quite say is or no. 

  One of the girls seems to feel the state of his hair is a personal failure on her part, or that Murna will think so, and is set to cry preemptively. The other is trying to be tactful, standing with her weight back on one foot and one eye squinched as if that will hold the wrong words in. Murna does sigh over that, and holds her arms out for the first girl.

  “He comes by that from me, quite fairly,” she tells her. “And at least his eyes are set level, even if his jaw is rather less so.”

 

 

  In the ordinary way between two tribes, maybe they and the Caledones would each have rushed away to start rinsing their wounds and hope to be hale again, if not whole, soon enough to catch the other off their feet. That was the way with Liadhan at least, most of what Murna had known before. But there is more in their peace than the space between battles: the passing of wine and beads and wool, and the great interlocking labor of farming and raising which calls in every hand that can be found, the stewardship of wells in the high hills and curing of salt by the shores, and every thing that people build among themselves is a weight on the side of letting be. It may be worth leaving many of your neighbors’ offenses where they fall, if it keeps the good things between you. They forgive all but the bitterest blows of the cattle raiding here in the north together, and deal back the same.

  Murna might have said two Royal Women could not eat together in one hall, just as two kings cannot live comfortably together, because that too is what she had known. But the years towards her boy’s king-making are already passing unassailed, Conory turned towards the Queen’s Captain and balancing the boy, four summers now, on his mostly-good thigh, then wincing to Murna’s distant satisfaction when her boy kicks him accidentally in the knee. The Dalriadain who rose against Liadhan are content enough with this, and tired enough of fighting that contentment is more than worth the price of keeping.

  Maybe it is the same with the Caledones. And maybe the Caledone Queen’s house was not made like Liadhan’s, because she will sit by Murna, and give and take salt from her hands, and perhaps finds in the same moment she does that she feels no need to take more offense or give it.

 If it had gone as Murna thought, she would have been on the last field, and if he had stepped out in front of her she would have killed Bruide herself. As it went she was not, and did not, and both of their men are gone now, and when she turns to the Queen and smiles she lets the words stay there on her tongue, neither saying them aloud nor doing them both the dishonor of hiding. 

  One day, one of their nations may eat up the other, or maybe they will join for both’s better, and it will matter little enough with the passing time. But for two more king’s lifetimes at least, they will remember what is worth and keep their peace.

 

 

  Each day’s sunset sears the edges of the world, skirting away dangling locks and tangles of what was once going to be and all the lands you could think of walking but can never quite see, where whoever goes before us keep new hearths in far dark hills. They belong in the night world as the fall of rain that fades with the rising warmth of the day and can only be half-real, remembered, in our own. Inside the circle of the sun are all the real things of our days: our lands, our peoples, our homes, and we cannot pass beyond them to the others while we live.

 So every day we follow our steps in the rhythm of the hall, planting and harvest and the breaking and running of foals, and at dawn or falling dark we may stand a while on our way between houses of the dun as the sun cuts open the sky over the highlands, half-real for a moment.


End file.
